Bryan R. Monte
First Impressions of Dutch and Dutch Gay Culture
My first impression of Dutch culture came even before my plane landed at Schiphol Airport in May 1989. While still in flight, I looked at the multi-coloured Dutch banknotes, which grew in size as their value increased, that I had purchased at a San Francisco currency exchange. I noticed that unlike American paper money, Dutch paper currency didn’t feature government leaders or buildings. Instead, the five, ten, and 25 guilder banknotes featured a playwright (Joost van den Vondel), a painter (Frans Hals), and a composer (Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck), respectively. In addition, there was also national flora (a beautiful, large sunflower) and fauna (a snipe) and a lighthouse on the 50, 100, and 250-guilder notes respectively. The Dutch banknotes seemed to give off a scenic, non-political, cultural vibe.
My second impression of Dutch culture was when the plane landed and people waited to clear immigration and customs. Here, ‘people were so quiet…as if they had suddenly walked into a church’ as they stood one at a time before an immigration agent, who sat above them on a raised podium. My third was of the Dutch national transportation system which was very different. Unlike San Francisco’s airport, which had no rail a link to the City despite its nearby CalTrans rails, Schiphol had a multi-track train station directly below the airport. (San Francisco’s airport wouldn’t have a direct Bay Area Rapid Transit connection until 2003). In addition, not only was it possible to get a train from Schiphol to Amsterdam but also to any other city and many towns due to a rail network that criss-crossed the country. And, as I rode a train direct from the airport to its capital city, I also noticed how people in the train spoke a bit more quietly to one another and that I didn’t hear music from Walkmans spilling out into the train compartment. This was very different than in the States where people didn’t keep their conversations or their music as much to themselves.
My fourth impression was of the cyclists in the Amsterdam’s Overtoom neighbourhood, near where I would be staying for a week on a houseboat. I wrote in my journal, ‘The bicyclists in this town are wonderful. They all ride so fast, racing each other and cutting just seconds in front of trams and autos.’ I also noticed parents doing the school runs ‘with one smaller child in front sitting between the handlebars and one larger child sitting over the back wheel’ (and none of the three were wearing helmets). However, I hadn’t travelled to the Netherlands to admire its currency, well-developed public transport system, or its cyclists’ daredevil behaviour, but to make direct contact with its gay community.
Fortunately, I had come prepared with introductions from Hans H., a mining school graduate from the Technische Universiteit Delft, who had followed his boyfriend back to California. I met both men at the weekly gay men’s group at Stanford University’s Firehouse. I mentioned this in my memoir entitled: ‘Ground Zero/Islands in the Sunset’ at https://www.amsterdamquarterly.org/aq_issues/aq44-between-hope-despair/bryan-r-monte-ground-zero-islands-in-the-sunset/. Hans H. had told me then that if I ever made it to the Netherlands, I should get in touch with Floris Michiels van Kessenich and Jack van Ginhoven, who were the founder and the current president of the Donderdagavond Eetclub (the Thursday Evening Dining Club). This group met in Amsterdam on the third Thursday of the month.
I also had the addresses of Boekhandel Vrolijk, then at the Voetboogstraat 8, which had sold my magazine, No Apologies: a magazine of gay writing, in the mid-80s and the national the LGBTQ+ umbrella organisation, the COC or Cultuur en Onspannings Centrum, (Centre for Culture and Recreation) at Rozenstraat 12. With these introductions and the two addresses I was able to come in contact with three philosophically and politically different parts of the Dutch gay movement: the T-shirts and jeans of the leftist/socialist wing, the national COC social centrists, and the more right of centre suits and ties of the DEC.
Boekhandel Vrolijk was the first place I visited. Here, I struck up a conversation with a clerk, Eric M., who remembered selling No Apologies at the Vrojilk. I asked him if there were any readings around town and he told me to look in the Dutch gay national magazine, Homologie. I did, but I didn’t see any.
Then I asked Eric M. if he knew of anyone who was involved in gay studies and he said I should ring the upstairs bell for Gert Hekma. I did and Hekma answered the door. I asked him if he knew about any gay writers’ groups in Holland. He said there was one, but it had recently disbanded. Then Mattias Dujves came downstairs. The three of us soon got into a discussion about the status of gay politics—its progress, despite its pitfalls and blunders, both in America and the Netherlands. Duyves praised America for having the first elected gay officials who received worldwide attention. However, I mentioned that Harvey Milk was assassinated a little more than a year after he took office. In addition, I added that the US gay community did have elected gay officials, but gays and lesbians still had no real political power nor did they have real legal protection. Moreover, I mentioned that despite AIDS, there was no health insurance which was available to everyone in that States compared to the Dutch mandatory, single-payer system.
Duyves cautioned me against idealizing the Netherlands and in making judgments from first impressions. I countered that first impressions were often the strongest, clearest, and truest since they weren’t muddled by other experiences. (Later that evening, when Duyves, Hekma, and I met Brit John R., John R. agreed with my idea of the power of first impressions.)
These were the type of political conversations I remembered from my student days at Berkeley and Brown: ideology mixed with recent historical events. I immediately felt energized by my conversation with Hekma and Duyves. As member of the Harvey Milk Lesbian and Gay Democratic Club in San Francisco there was no theorising. It was all about practical things: voter registration at gay events, making telephone calls, passing out leaflets at subways stations, and hanging voter information cards on doorknobs the day of elections.
We later went to Duyves’s flat on the Oudezijds Voorburgwal. It was in an old, 17th century building with steep flights of stairs to the upper stories and literally a ladder up to the very top floor. Duyves and I talked on his deck, sunning ourselves. Hekma went somewhere else for a few hours. The weather was exceptionally warm and cloudless. (In fact, it hadn’t rained once since I arrived two days earlier.) It was exactly like San Francisco on a warm day before the fog comes in. After a few hours of talking, Hekma arrived around four or five in the afternoon and Duyves steered me in the direction of the student cafeteria at the University of Amsterdam where I had supper for only Hfl 1.90! Then I went back to my room on the houseboat, napped until 9:30 PM, and returned to Hekma’s apartment at 10.30.
We talked a bit about the early gay liberation movement in the US and UK—and speculated how it might have appropriated terminology from the black liberation movement. In addition, both John and I noticed a decline in the militancy of the gay groups language and tactics, both in the US and the UK, by the late-70s.
Then we talked a little about No Apologies and the current state of gay writing in the US. I told them about Outlook, which Hekma and Duyves had both seen. They agreed with me that the focus of the magazine was different from mine—slicker, not as academic, and more pop cultural oriented. They asked me if I knew anything about The James White Review, published by Phil Willkie in Minneapolis. I said I did and that the JWR had published some of my poems. I also mentioned that Willkie had visited me in San Francisco and at Brown and that I had stayed at his flat in St. Paul, Minnesota before attending a JWR writing seminar led by Robert Peters at the Willkies’ Wisconsin cabin,
John R. left around midnight to finish his article for Homologie. (It was scheduled to appear after the next double issue on AIDS.) He was writing it in English and someone was to translate it into Dutch.
***
A few days later, on 12 May 1989, I met the DEC’s founder, Floris Michiels van Kessenich purely by chance while visiting at the COC late in the afternoon. The COC was created after WWII in the Netherlands to give LGBTQ+ people a safe place to meet, social, and organize. Most towns with populations over 100,000 had their own COC, and the COC was present in all twelve Dutch provinces. Most COC’s had bars and discos and larger locations had also meeting rooms and sometimes auditoriums.
In California, Hans H. had described Jonkheer Floris Michiels van Kessenich as a real gay firebrand and the man to meet. In addition to founding the Donderdagavond Eetclub, Michiels van Kessenich had formed a gay fraternity at Leiden University (the Dutch Harvard), protested when Dutch Caltholic church priests had refused to serve communion to people wearing buttons identifying themselves as gay, took part in gay march with a sign, ‘Adel loopt took mee’. ‘Nobility is marching too’.
Michiels van Kessenich walked with me to the nearby Homomonument outside the Westerkerk, where he described the nature and construction of the monument…‘composed of three triangles of reddish, pink marble…The first triangle is in the Westerkerk grounds and points toward the Anne Frank House…This triangle symbolizes the past and oppression. The next triangle is across from the other (but) still in the Westerkerk yard. It has a raised platform of pink marble about two feet high’. Michiels van Kessenich said people use this triangle ‘as a stage when they had public events…This triangle symbolizes the present. It points towards the Dutch former city hall (now the Royal Palace). The last triangle …is composed of four or five marble steps which lead down to a pink marble triangle which is barely out of the water. ‘This,’ Floris said, ‘stands for the future of gay people in Holland… barely out of the water. This triangle points to the Ijsselmeer, formerly the Zuiderzee, which symbolizes The Netherlands’s progress and its future’.
Then Michiels van Kessenich and I walked along the Prinsengracht to his house in the Lauriergracht. On his front door I was surprised to see his name in large, white, script letters, which were visible from the street. Next to his door, was the door to his partner’s, Michael Kovner’s, upstairs flat with his name also prominently painted. (I also remember a Monty-Pythonish-Flying-Circus-cartoon-opening-sequence similar flowers painted on the walls of Michiels van Kessenich’s and Kovner’s building, but perhaps that is my own creation.) So, ‘The Love That Dare Not Speak Its Name’ wouldn’t shut up visually as far as Michiels van Kessenich’s and Kovener’s front doors were concerned. Inside Michiels van Kessenich’s flat was a dining room, then a living room with an old theatre sofa and an arm chair. Both rooms were messy and stuffed with newspapers and books. He also had two cats, two guinea pigs, and a rabbit which he kept in a hutch in the airwell next to a very small 10 x 5 ft. kitchen. Above the dining room was a loft space for a bedroom. The loft was connected to the downstairs by a spiral staircase.
Michiels van Kessenich talked to me while cleaning up, making a flower arrangement, and preparing tea. We talked quickly because he had to leave at 7 p.m. to interview an Utrecht couple for a news story. I told him how lucky I was to run into him because I only had his address and Jack van Ginhoven’s in Utrecht. He apologized for not answering his/my correspondence. We talked about the problems of the gay movement in the Netherlands and the United States. I told him travel restrictions to the States were increasing. The recent Hans Paul Verhoef incident demonstrated that, and the Dutch were well aware something had changed in the States. (In 1989, Paul Hans Verhoef (1957-1990), a Dutch HIV/AIDS activist, was detained and jailed in Minneapolis, Minnesota while travelling to a San Francisco health conference. US Customs discovered AZT, an anti-HIV drug, in his luggage, and he was arrested due to a 1987 federal law banning foreigners with HIV from entering the US. Verhoef was imprisoned for five days, which generated international protests.) At the end of our conversation, Michiels van Kessenich invited me to dinner on Saturday night. He told me to meet him at his house at 8 p.m. That night we went to a restaurant on the Rembrandtplein and later to Le Schoko disco near the Amstel. Unfortunately, I didn’t make a journal entry about that evening.
In the meantime, Duyves had very generously invited me to stay at his flat during the second week of my Dutch holiday. However, since his flat was located in the Red Light District, I was sometimes awakened in the middle of the night by men serenading the women behind the red-lighted windows, sometimes with guitar accompaniment, before some (I assume) went in for a visit. In addition, I discovered the first Sunday and Monday were both national holidays in the Netherlands (1st and 2nd Whitsuntide), so all the shops and almost all the neighbourhood restaurants and cafes were closed both days. I remember eating food from the Wallen’s snackbars including fried chips with mayonnaise, calf croquettes, and hamburgers, and washed these down with sodas.
I also discovered that most Dutch public holidays (except Christmas), were during the first six months of the year. This kept the summer free for Dutch employees to take their mandatory four week holidays. In addition, Christmas, Easter, and Whitsuntide all had a second day the following Monday which was also a national holiday.
The morning of Thursday, 18 May 1989, I went to Zandvoort aan Zee with Eric M. to the gay nude beach, which was quite a hike from the closer family beaches. The gay beach was near the Zeezicht beach café, practically at the end of the public beach. Eric told me gays referred to the café as Zeenicht, literarly meaning female cousin, but in gay slang, queen. By noon there were about 50 to 60 people in this part of the beach, mostly men, although there were some women and male/female couples.
I enjoyed Eric M.’s company. He told me he’d been involved with Vrolijk for a few years. Before that, he’d taught Dutch at a high school and had squatted in a building, which, when he first moved in, was a dark warehouse with no lighting. Eric M. smoked cigarettes as did most gay men in the Netherlands. I assumed that the health education information I had received in junior high school about the dangers of smoking, including physically handling the smaller, dried, darker lungs of smokers versus the larger, neutral coloured lungs of non-smokers, hadn’t occurred in Dutch secondary schools. The year before, San Francisco had just passed legislation banning smoking in offices and other places of business (including gay bars) , so I was a bit uncomfortable going out to gay bars in Amsterdam due to the smoke which saturated my clothes by the time I left. Eric M. and I left for Amsterdam in the late afternoon. I needed to get back to Duyves’s to cleaned up in time for the DEC dinner that evening at Café L’Opera on the Rembrandtplein.
There I met Jack van Ginhoven, the president of the DEC. He was a somewhat shorter man with black hair and a black moustache flecked with grey. He wore a blue suit with a green tie and was with a group of men drinking beer out of the shorter, thin, traditional Dutch beer glasses called flautjes used in pubs and restaurants. Everyone referred to Van Ginhoven, including the writer of his 2010 obituary in the Utrechtse Dagblad, as ‘the eternal student’. He came from Drenthe, a primarily agricultural province, to study in Utrecht and never left. Later I was told by a DEC member that Van Ginhoven had even lived for decades in the same room he’d rented as a student.
Van Ginhoven first asked me how I’d met Hans H. Then we talked about the quality of gay life in the Netherlands and in the US. However, it was very difficult to communicate with him due to my very limited, tourist-level Dutch. Fortunately, some of the DEC men offered to translate. I mentioned again the Verhoef incident and how US insurance companies were considering redlining gay neighbourhoods for health and life insurance due to the rising number of AIDS cases. I also told him that I believed that the only way San Francisco’s gay community could possibly begin to turn the tide was for Harry Britt’s domestic partner legislation to pass. (It wouldn’t until 1992). I also observed that the Netherlands seemed to be at least ten years ahead of the States: there seemed to be fewer people with AIDS and much more public health information.
It was at this dinner that I probably first met international banker Robert van der Poel, the next DEC president. Van Der Poel familiarized me with DEC’s usual monthly calendar and special annual events such as the Queen’s Day boat ride through Amsterdam’s canals on 30 April, an auto rally and picnic in the countryside in May, and the annual formal dinner (tux required) in the late autumn or early winter. I was Van Der Poel’s house guest at least twice in the early ’90s while on holiday in the Netherlands.
***
Unfortunately, the next time I saw Michiels van Kessenich, at the end of September 1990 on my next visit to Amsterdam, I was shocked by how much he had changed physically. He opened the door to his flat wearing a large pair of glasses, which made his head appear as if it had shrunk. Michiels van Kessenich told me the new glasses were due to problems with his eyesight. I had seen similar changes in people with AIDS in San Francisco due to CMV (cytomegalovirus) infections or other HIV-related causes. We talked about our work as reporters: mine for a weekly gay radio programme for KPFA-FM in Berkeley and his for De Gay Krant, the Dutch, national gay newsmagazine. He mentioned his own struggle with AIDS as he played with his new kittens. In addition, he advised me that things didn’t seem to be going well with gay rights in America, so I should consider moving to the Netherlands, where basic gay rights were guaranteed in the constitution since 1983. (However, same-sex marriage was yet to come in 1998.) Michiels van Kessenich felt the States were years behind the Netherlands. This echoed what Bill Kraus, Harry Britt’s administrative advisor, had told me during the June 1982 Pride March, that AIDS would set back the American gay movement a generation. Krauss died from AIDS in January 1986.
I told Floris I was on my way to Berlin to cover the dissolution of the East German government and its effect on the LGBTQ+ community and to visit with Heiner Carrow and Dirk Kummer, the director and star of the ground-breaking and the last East German film, Coming Out. I had interviewed them on a gay weekly radio on programme in German and English a few months previously. (More about this Berlin meeting can be found at https://www.amsterdamquarterly.org/aq_issues/aq2-remembrance/bryan-r-monte-the-last-harvest/) Michiels van Kessenich asked me to stay in touch and I did. However, my last card to him was returned in early 1992 with a black box around his address. Sadly, I knew enough about Dutch culture at that point to know what that meant without having to consult anyone. AQ